A single event upset (SEU) is a change of state caused by alpha particles, neutrons, ions or electro-magnetic radiation in an electronic device, such as a chip or an integrated circuit. The integrated circuit may be a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) or an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The electronic device may be part of a larger system. For example, the system may include several chips or integrated circuits. The change of state may affect the configuration or lead to an error, a malfunction, or a failure of the electronic device and/or of a different part of the system. The error caused by a SEU may be correctable (i.e., a soft error), or a non-correctable error (i.e., a fatal error). An SEU rate may be proportional to the amount of memory in the electronic device. For FPGA's, the SEU rate is proportional to the amount of configuration memory. Even with a large amount of memory, a small percentage of SEU events may cause malfunction of the electronic device. When large volumes of electronic devices are produced, either as stand-alone products or as part of a system, even a small amount of SEU events may create problematic quality issues for a manufacturer or user of the electronic devices or systems.
In order to determine the SEU impact on a system, the system is sent to a neutron lab and is bombarded with real neutrons while the response of the system is observed. By observing the response, the SEU-related system failure rate is calculated, various SEU-related failure symptoms that can link similar field failures to SEU events are collected, areas in a system that are sensitive to SEU events and require most SEU protection are identified, and SEU-resilient system designs are validated. However, performing tests on systems in neutrons labs is time consuming and costly.